President George W. Bush has continued to reject assertions that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. But with the President set to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan, to discuss the country's continuing sectarian violence, some human rights experts are worrying about a different, worse fate for Iraq: genocide.
Gregory Stanton, a professor of human rights at Virginia's University of Mary Washington, sees in Iraq the same troubling signs of preparation and execution of genocidal aims that he saw in the 1990s in Rwanda when he worked at the State Department. Sunni and Shiite militias are "trying to polarize the country, they're systematically trying to assassinate moderates, and they're trying to divide the population into homogenous religious sectors," Stanton says. All of those undertakings, he says, are "characteristics of genocide," and his organization, Genocide Watch, is preparing to declare the country in a "genocide emergency."
I don't know what this mean. It may be a prelude to declaring the situation hopeless. We have, after all, not just recent but simultaneous evidence of the ineffectiveness of merely labelling things.
Fierce Fighting Breaks Out in Sudan's South
Reuters
Friday, December 1, 2006; A20KHARTOUM, Sudan, Nov. 30 -- Hundreds of people may have been killed in the heaviest fighting between Sudan's former north-south foes since they signed a peace deal last year, a former senior rebel officer said Thursday.
Terrified civilians in the southern town of Malakal reported looting and bodies in the streets after three days of clashes, and U.N. officials in New York said 240 civilian workers had been temporarily evacuated.
"More than hundreds have been lost. The Sudan army sustained very heavy casualties, and civilians were caught in the crossfire," said Elias Waya Nyipuocs, a former senior officer in the Sudan People's Liberation Army, a rebel group that fought the government in a long civil war.
Nyipuocs said a militia allied with the Sudanese armed forces attacked the SPLA and the local commissioner of Malakal. The militiamen then took refuge in military barracks near the airport and full combat began. Nyipuocs said the armed forces fought "side by side" with the militia against the SPLA.
I can't get excited about a 'potential genocide' when I see how lackadaisial the world is about actual ones. If you want to inspire greater support for the Iraq invasion, you should pick something people care about. As Charles Krauthammer says.
If we really had been in the grip of "idealism," we'd be deep in Chad and Burma and Darfur. We are not.
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